Samuli Kemppi comes from a small city in Finland, but geographical distance hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of Europe’s leading techno producers. However, as he recalls, life in the frozen north always presented some cultural difficulties.

“Track hunting was more challenging in the pre-internet era, specially up here. In the late eighties, there were one or two radio shows that played these unheard sounds that I immediately liked. I think Dutch, Belgian and British sounds were the biggest inspiration to me in the dawn of nineties when I was playing my first gigs. Also some older electro stuff like Africa Bambaata and Egyptian Lover were huge to me,” he explains. Finland was an early adapter of electronic music, something that is borne out by the presence of the pioneering minimalism of Sahko, the label that influenced Sleeparchive and Sandwell District’s sounds. Samuli admits that the first time he heard the music of Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, it was ‘mind blowing’. “It was so simple and functional, straight to the point,” he says, but hastens to add that “it was not just techno and electro that I grew up listening to. Herbie Hancock was big to me, especially the stuff he did with the Rockit band. Seeing Grandmixer DST doing a turntablism show on my dad’s VHS was a life-changing point.”

Having worked as a DJ since the early 90s, Samuli started to produce music at the start of the new millennium. He worked on the deep house project, Sam & Gigi, which featured the vocalist Laura Petris-Forsell and which yielded or a brace of singles at the start of the 00s. “Deep house has always been big in Helsinki and there are some really good DJs and producers in that field,” he feels. “Laura (Gigi) wrote the tracks with me and she wrote lyrics and sung. Our last gig was at the end of 2005. Laura was 5 months pregnant at that time. So family happened and I went back to my roots, which is techno,” Samuli explains.